WSU Baseball: Previewing Northern Colorado

"Lower the tee a little bit more, please? Like this high
would be perfect."

This weekend the WSU baseball team plays three against the University of Northern Colorado (UNC) Bears, a team I knew literally nothing about until just about 20 minutes before writing this. This post could be long or short, depending on how interesting the Bears are.

Probably not very interesting.

The school I'd never heard of plays in a conference I've never heard of! The Bears play in the Great West conference for baseball; currently leading the Great West is baseball team/1960's airline, UT Pan American, at 3-0.

There are two technical schools in the Great West, it's far from being a power conference; in fact, four of the conferences eight teams (HALF!) have .000 winning percentages this year.

Done laughing at the Great West? Perfect! Let's move on to the actual team itself.

Okay, Northern Colorado is 0-4 on the season after getting beat down by North Dakota State this past weekend (11-4, 11-2, 18-4, 18-2). NDSU is a pretty decent team who just happened to take one game from No. 20 Arizona two weekends ago before proceeding to beat the piss out of UNC.

Fun fact! The final two games of that series, where NDSU scored 36 total runs, were both only seven innings. I feel like the rest of this post might be mostly in "fun fact" form. Get used to it.

Another fun fact! NDSU has four pitchers on the season who have recorded starts, their ERA's are: 9.64, 21.60, 23.14, and 27.00. These same pitchers are allowing opposing batters to hit .368, .500, .600 and .500 respectively.

I get the feeling Ard, Monda, Jones and Blackham are pretty excited for this weekend.

As of now the starting rotation for WSU is still the same, meaning Leckenby Friday, Swannack Saturday, Chleborad Sunday. Chleborad didn't pitch this past weekend due to family issues.

The bottom line on UNC is that it's a very low-tier team and honestly we shouldn't expect anything less than a sweep by the Cougs.

You all should know by now how much I like Leckenby and Chleborad, but if you'd like a little insight on Swannack and what I see in him, here's a great little link for you to click on!

The WSU offense came to life this weekend against Nebraska Omaha, but not necessarily entirely. The bats were inconsistent and solid contact wasn't always easy to come by, some of this may be due to the terrible weather. Derek Jones talked to me after the Friday's games about how cold really affects your wrists and thusly, your ability to be successful at the plate.

The cold stiffens up your wrists and makes it hard to hit with much success, obviously this isn't as much a problem for experienced players who are used to the Pullman cold but it may still be affecting some of the younger players.

The last thing I have for you is some preview audio from Nate Blackham and Coach Marbut. Enjoy!

Nate Blackham - Northern Colorado Preview (Click Me To Play)

Coach Marbut - Northern Colorado Preview (Click Me To Play)